They could be. The attempt is to factor that out. ALL measuring agents applied to ALL the backbones. And all contributed more or less equally to the end numbers. If a particular agent ran on a Commodore 64 with a kluged copy of KA9Q, and another agent ran on an Sun Solaris, both results would go into the result pile for all 29 measured networks. The net effect would be that the flaw would be in our "footprint" from which the measurements were taken. This footprint can only be a rough approximation of end user distribution anyway. It would affect absolute values relative to zero, but the relative indexes between networks should not be affected. Since we're looking at the relative relationship primarily, it wouldn't appear important.

Jack Rickard

Jack, you appear to be saying that the ranking is the important issue, but that the actually timing numbers are not important. Will you clarify this for me? The web page does not say what the configuration of the "high performance workstations" are and there is the possibliity that the artifacts could be so large that none of the data is meaningful. If you are saying that the "high performance workstations" vary from "a Commodore 64 with a kluged copy of KA9Q, and another agent ran on an Sun Solaris", you still have not eliminated the possiblity that the artifacts are so big to make the data meaningful. [Although, I note that Keynote does not publish the fact that they run on KA9Q on a Commodore 64 on their web site, so I would assume that none of the agents really do run on that configuaration.] Could you possibly get more detail on these configurations? -- Stan | Academ Consulting Services |internet: sob@academ.com Olan | For more info on academ, see this |uucp: {mcsun|amdahl}!academ!sob Barber | URL- http://www.academ.com/academ |Opinions expressed are only mine.